


moving mountains

by peardita



Series: recovery in motion [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Background characters - Freeform, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, M/M, Nightmares, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Recovery, Serious Injuries
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-05
Updated: 2014-05-05
Packaged: 2018-01-22 00:36:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,523
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1569536
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/peardita/pseuds/peardita
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>Not all of his nightmares are about watching Riley fall. In some of them, he catches Riley and can’t hold on—Riley begs and pleads as he slips through his fingers and falls a second, final time.</em>
</p><p>Or, the cost of helping Captain America may be high, but it's a price Sam Wilson is willing to pay.</p>
            </blockquote>





	moving mountains

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the prompt "recovery is an ongoing process, not an endpoint."
> 
> Thanks to [WitticasterCole](http://archiveofourown.org/users/WitticasterCole/pseuds/WitticasterCole) for the beta, and [Chai](http://archiveofourown.org/users/dirtydirtychai) for the grammar-picking. All remaining mistakes are mine.

In the movies, in the books, it’s always a loud bang like a gunshot (never mind that the guns and explosions in movies sound nothing like the real thing), or too many voices in a crowd of people, or the sight of blood and someone crying out in pain, and it could be any of those things, yes, but—

Not all of his nightmares are about watching Riley fall. In some of them, he catches Riley and can’t hold on—Riley begs and pleads as he slips through his fingers and falls a second, final time.

The specific _whir_ and _shh_ as the wings retract is not loud like a gunshot, but he can feel it in the muscles of his back, in his spine, in his core, and he’s back, back, _back,_ landing after all his months and years of training were useless, landing after he failed to have his wingman’s back, landing, staggering, like gravity had gotten heavier, like the weight of watching Riley die was going to be too much to carry.

(He can carry it now—most of the time.)

He catches Jasper Sitwell.

Walks away, turns around, calm as you please, lets it show on his face: next time, he’s ready to let Sitwell fall.

He _is_ ready. He suggested it. They needed someone who was an unknown quantity, someone the enemy wouldn’t see coming. They needed this information fast. He may be slower than Steve on the ground, but in the air he’s about as fast as they come—

(Except for catching Riley.)

Never mind that this is the first time he’s heard the roar of his jetpack in years, the first time he’s felt the vibrations in every limb and joint— _don’t think about that now_. Compartmentalization is a strategy that works. Only in the short term, but sometimes you have to use whatever tactics you can to survive, to keep going, to carry you forward when you have something that needs to get done (staying alive), when you have a _mission_ —

The bunch and pull of the straps over his jeans is different; he’s never worn the pack with civvies before. He focuses on the feel, how the texture of denim differs from his ABUs—

Next time, he’s going to let Jasper Sitwell drop.

 

 

In his kitchen he’s putting extra bacon, extra eggs, on plates—Steve’s body looks like he subsists on protein alone. And thank goodness frozen hash browns were on sale so he got extra of those—he can cook just fine, thanks, but sometimes a person wants convenience. Like when he’s been winded, stretched out and burning in his calves, his quads, his lungs, trying to chase down Captain America on his morning jog.

If someone had told him he didn’t need to chase the man down, that Steve would come to him, he would have scoffed.

Now two of probably the most badass people in the world are sitting worn and bruised at his breakfast bar, scarfing down his home cooking—turns out badass super-spies do eat breakfast after all. He doesn’t have context for half of what they’re saying, but he’s getting the important part: they’ve got their backs to the wall, and they can’t do this on their own.

There’s a part of him that’s _always_ going to want to fly again, always going to miss the wings—but how can you miss what you see sometimes every single night in your nightmares, as clear and sharp as if it were real—

(It is real, to him. That’s the problem.)

That’s not why he suggests it, not why he says, “consider it a resume,” not why he drops the file on the counter in front of them.

The motto of the USAF Pararescue is “That Others May Live,” and if this is anywhere near as bad as they’re making it sound, a lot of lives hang in the balance. So much of his training has gone into thinking tactically; how to get in and out of difficult or impossible situations as quickly as possible, how to judge what will be needed next, so you can stay a step ahead. Two steps ahead.

Sitwell talks, so he doesn’t have to let him fall.

 

 

He told Steve he got out because after Riley died, he couldn’t handle it anymore. What he didn’t say was at the time he couldn’t handle _any_ of it: the smell of the plastic, the specific weight and shape of the wing pack on his back, the creak of the leather-and-PVC as the straps settled and flexed across his body, the specific scent and flavor and sting of sailing through the dry desert air, the quiet hiss of the hydraulics as the wings deployed, even the shadow of the sunlight filtering through their semi-transparent surfaces.

He has a little better handle on it now, years and countless hours of therapy and work later—but he knows his limits, knows he can’t keep it all down indefinitely.

“I'm gonna need a ride,” Steve says, and for a moment there’s the sickening stomach clench and drop of realizing Steve’s already in the air, that he’s already _falling_ —

He catches Steve, grabs him by the hand, feels the wrench like his shoulder is momentarily considering being yanked out of his socket. He knows he’s got a hold of Steve, he _knows_ —but he also can’t afford to look down, has to keep his eyes on the gunfire, on where they’re going, and he can feel Steve’s hand warm in his, but he can also feel him slipping, slipping, dropping, hundreds of hours of nightmares superimposed over reality until he can’t tell which is true, can’t actually tell if he’s let America’s greatest hero, maybe the world’s last hope, fall to his death—

Until they’re landing on the deck and he’s almost surprised to see Steve there beside him. “You know, you’re a lot heavier than you look”—

Even though half the time he would have sworn he wasn’t even holding Steve’s weight at all, couldn’t feel it in his fingers, in his muscles, battling against his brain, against gravity—

Crack a joke and move on: he still has a job to do.

 

 

Sometimes in his nightmares, he does catch Riley, gets him safely to the ground. And then his training—some of the best EMT, field surgery, and combat trauma management training in the world—fails him, and he feels his best friend, his brother in arms, bleed out under his hands, feels his pulse get reedy and slow, feels his breathing get raspy, choked and desperate—feels one of the best men he’s ever known turn into a corpse under his touch, and there’s nothing he can do about it.

He’s not one of the paramedics who finds Steve after, on the muddy riverbank. He’s miles away, knows he won’t be any use, too shocky and wrecked now that he’s on an adrenaline comedown, now that they’ve _won_ —

(It won’t be a win, it will never be a win to him, unless they find Steve.)

He knows right now his own hurts only _feel_ inconsequential, that if he doesn’t let them look him over in a few days he’ll be worse than useless. So he’s a good soldier, lets the doctors look him over, Natasha also. It’s a small consolation that she looks even remotely close to as bad as he feels.

They’re both there when the call comes in, when he demands the full preliminary assessment, Natasha a silent threat at his side, backing him up. There’s two GSWs, one to Steve’s abdomen, one to his thigh, but the initial trauma is not the problem. The problem is he obviously kept moving, kept fighting after the abdominal shot—of course he did—and gave himself all kinds of secondary internal damage.

“Any ordinary human would have been killed several times over,” one of the attendings tells them when they corner him. “In terms of prognosis, that’s all anyone can give you right now.”

Steve’s in surgery, the surgeons are some of the best—he doesn’t have to worry about his skills failing him, because there’s nothing for him to do, nothing but _sit and wait_ —

He can do that.

 

 

He counts his breaths to the sounds of Marvin Gaye, keeps his eyes on the page, even if he’s not absorbing anything he’s reading. The mission has changed, but he’s still on a mission, and he’ll stay by Steve’s side for as long as it takes.

When he hears that voice, soft and raspy, saying, “On your left”—now the three most beautiful words in the English language—he looks up, lets himself smile, slow and genuine. On the inside he lets out the breath it feels like he’s been holding continuously for the past five days.

He’s off mission now, and you can’t compartmentalize forever. Time to put the walls back down and go to work patching himself back up.

Then Steve smiles back at him, small and sweet, and Sam thinks maybe this time he’ll have a new wingman to help him catch himself as he falls.

**Author's Note:**

> I've fixed the two lines of movie dialog.
> 
> I have a lot of feelings about Sam Wilson. Sometimes I talk about them on my [tumblr](http://peardita.tumblr.com/).


End file.
